Connected Worlds History in Transnational Perspective

Connected Worlds History in Transnational Perspective

Co-edited by Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake

Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: anuepress@anu.edu.au Web: http://epress.anu.edu.au

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Connected worlds : history in trans-national perspective.

Includes index

ISBN 1 920942 44 0 ISBN 1 920942 45 9 (online)

1. Historiography. 2. World history. 3. Australia - Historiography. I. Curthoys, Ann, 1945- . II. Lake, Marilyn.

907.2094

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Copyedited and indexed by Robin Ward. Cover design by Brendon McKinley. The cover image was taken from Jacob Roggeveen (et al.), Dagverhaal der ontdekkings-reis van Mr. Jacob Roggeveen : met de Schepen den Arend, Thienhoven en de Afrikaansche Galei, in de jaren 1721 en 1722 / met toestemming van Zijne Excellentie den Minister van Kolonien uitgegeven door het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen, (Middelburg: Gebroeders Abrahams, 1838), held in the Menzies Library rare book collection, The Australian National University, Canberra.

This edition © 2005 ANU E Press

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements: .................................................................................. vContributors: ....................................................................................vii1. Introduction: Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake .................................. 5Different Modes of Transnational History .................................................. 21

2. Putting the nation in its place?: world history and C. A. Bayly’sThe Birth of the Modern World: Tony Ballantyne ................................. 233. Paths not yet taken, voices not yet heard: rethinking Atlantichistory: Michael A. McDonnell .......................................................... 454. Postcolonial histories and Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: AngelaWoollacott ........................................................................................ 63

Migration and Other Voyages .................................................................... 755. Steal a handkerchief, see the world: the trans-oceanic voyaging ofThomas Limpus: Emma Christopher ................................................... 776. Revolution and respectability: Chinese Masons in Australianhistory: John Fitzgerald ..................................................................... 897. ‘Innocents abroad’ and ‘prohibited immigrants’: Australians inIndia and Indians in Australia 1890–1910: Margaret Allen ................ 1118. Postwar British emigrants and the ‘transnational moment’:exemplars of a ‘mobility of modernity’?: A. James Hammerton ......... 125

Modernity, Film and Romance ................................................................. 1379. ‘Films as foreign offices’: transnationalism at Paramount in thetwenties and early thirties: Desley Deacon ........................................ 13910. Modern nomads and national film history: the multi-continentalcareer of J. D. Williams: Jill Julius Matthews .................................... 15711. The Americanisation of romantic love in Australia: Hsu-MingTeo ................................................................................................. 171

Transnational Racial Politics .................................................................... 19312. Transcultural/transnational interaction and influences onAboriginal Australia: John Maynard ................................................. 19513. From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: the invention of theliteracy test as a technology of racial exclusion: Marilyn Lake ........... 209

Postcolonial Transnationalism ................................................................. 23114. Islam, Europe and Indian nationalism: towards a postcolonialtransnationalism: Patrick Wolfe ....................................................... 233

...............

.

Index ............................................................................... 267......................

Acknowledgements

Many people have assisted in the preparation of this book.

First, we wish to thank all those people involved in the conference, entitled theTrans-National History Symposium, which formed the basis of the presentvolume. While discussion of transnational history has been going on for sometime in the United States, this was the first time transnational history had beendiscussed explicitly and in detail at a conference of historians in Australia. TheSymposium, featuring some twenty participants, was held on 10 and 11 October2004 at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National Universityand attracted a lively audience from around Australia and overseas.

For their funding and administrative support we especially wish to thank theHRC, its Director Ian Donaldson and conference administrator, Leena Messina;the ANU National Institute for the Humanities and Creative Arts, its convenerAdam Shoemaker and administrator, Suzanne Knight, and the Faculty ofHumanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. We also wish to thankthose colleagues who presented stimulating papers which do not appear in thiscollection: Joanna Bourke, Laurence Brown, Georgine Clarsens, Liz Conor, JoyDamousi, Cassandra Pybus, Amanda Rasmussen and Pierre-Yves Saunier. Wethank our contributors for their responsiveness to editorial suggestions anddeadlines and in particular Desley Deacon and John Fitzgerald for reading andproviding useful feedback on the introduction.

Finally, we thank ANU E Press for its encouragement and support.

Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake

Contributors

Margaret Allen is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University ofAdelaide. Her research interests are focused within fields of feminist andpostcolonial histories. She is working on a biographical study of the Australianwriter Catherine Martin (1848–1937), on whom she has published many articles.She co-edited Fresh Evidence, New Witnesses, Finding Women’s History (SouthAustralian Government Printer, 1989), and has edited many journal special issuesincluding Gender in the ‘Contact Zone’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no.34, 2001. She is interested in locating Australians within the racialised hierarchiesof Empire, publishing ‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian WomenMissionaries in India’, Feminist Review, vol. 65, no. 1, 2000. Currently she holdsan ARC grant to investigate links between India and Australia 1880–c.1930within a broader imperial focus.

Tony Ballantyne. Before assuming his current position as Senior Lecturer inHistory at the University of Otago, Tony Ballantyne taught at the University ofIllinois, Urbana-Champaign and the National University of Ireland, Galway. Hisresearch focuses on the production of colonial knowledge in South Asia and thePacific as well as the institutional and discursive ‘webs’ that underpinned theBritish empire. His publications include Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in theBritish Empire (Basingstoke: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series,Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002) and Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encountersin World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), which he co-editedwith Antoinette Burton. In 2006 Duke University Press will also publish hisstudy of the intersections between religion, empire and migration, BetweenColonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World.

Emma Christopher is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Historical Studiesat Monash University, Melbourne. Originally a scholar of the transatlantic slavetrade, she gained her PhD at University College, London in 2002 andsubsequently taught for a year at the University of Toronto. Her book SlaveTrade Sailors and their Captive Cargoes is forthcoming with Cambridge UniversityPress, New York in 2006. Having more recently turned her attention to convicttransportation, she is currently working on a book about the British felons whowere sent to West Africa in the years prior to the settlement of Australia. Shehas published several articles on both the slave trade and convict transportation,and is also the co-editor (with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus) of OtherMiddle Passages , a collection exploring the global exportation of non-freepersons, which will be published by the University of California Press in 2006.

Ann Curthoys is Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian NationalUniversity. She writes about many aspects of Australian history, includingAboriginal-European relations, the development of the White Australia Policy,

journalism, television and feminism, as well as more generally about the pastand future of historical writing. Her book, Freedom Ride: A FreedomriderRemembers (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2002) was awarded the StannerPrize by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.Written jointly with John Docker, her most recent book is Is History Fiction?(Sydney and Ann Arbor, MI: University of New South Wales Press andUniversity of Michigan Press, 2005). She is currently working with AnnGenovese, Larissa Behrendt, and Alex Reilly on a study of the ways historicalexpertise is used by the law in cases involving Indigenous litigants.

Desley Deacon is Professor of Gender History in the History Program of theResearch School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She isauthor of Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press, 1997) and the forthcoming Mary McCarthy: Four Husbands anda Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) (the friend is Hannah Arendt).The lives of these women, and teaching for many years in the American StudiesDepartment at the University of Texas in Austin, stimulated her longstandinginterest in internationalism and transnational history. Her interest in the historyof film was stimulated by her research on McCarthy’s first husband, HaroldJohnsrud, who worked for MGM in the early 1930s, and will be continued inher new project ‘Judith Anderson 1897–1992: Voice and Emotion in the Makingof an International Star’.

John Fitzgerald worked at the Australian National University, in the AustralianFederal Parliament, and in the History Department of the University of Melbournebefore moving to La Trobe University in 1992 and taking up the Chair in AsianStudies there in 1995. In 1998, his book Awakening China: Politics, Culture andClass in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) wasawarded the Joseph Levenson Prize for Twentieth Century China by the USAssociation for Asian Studies. His recent books include John Fitzgerald, R.Jeffrey, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Maximizing Australia’s Asia Knowledge:Repositioning and Renewal of a National Asset (Bundoora, Vic: Asian StudiesAssociation of Australia, 2002); K. L. Billy, John Fitzgerald, Huang Jianli andJames K. Chin (eds) Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order: Festschrift inHonour of Professor Wang Gungwu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,2003); and Rethinking China’s Provinces (editor, New York, NY: Routledge, 2002).He has recently taken up the position of Director of the International Centre ofExcellence in Asia-Pacific Studies at the ANU.

James Hammerton, before his recent retirement, was Associate Professor ofHistory and Head of the School of Historical and European Studies at La TrobeUniversity. His publications include: Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Povertyand Female Emigration, 1830-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), Cruelty andCompanionship: Conflict in Nineteenth Century Married Life (London:

viii  Connected Worlds

Routledge,1992), and [with Eric Richards], Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimonyand the History of Australian Immigration (Canberra, ACT : History Program andCentre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Research School of SocialSciences, Australian National University, 2002). His current research focuses onthe emigration of the British since World War II; the first volume to flow fromthis research, ‘Ten Pound Poms’: Australia’s Invisible Migrants, co-authored withAlistair Thomson, was published in 2005 by Manchester University Press.

Marilyn Lake has an Australian Professorial Fellowship, based at La TrobeUniversity, and is also an Adjunct Professor in the Humanities Research Centre,Australian National University. Between 2001 and 2002, she held the Chair inAustralian Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Faith: FaithBandler, Gentle Activist (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2002), winner ofthe 2002 Human Rights award for non-fiction. Her research interests includeAustralian history; nation and nationalism; gender, war and citizenship;femininity and masculinity; history of feminism; race, gender and imperialism;global and transnational history. She is currently working on a study of theemergence of the idea of the white man’s country in a transnational context,that looks at intellectual and political developments linking Africa, America,Asia and Australasia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shehas recently edited Memory, Monuments and Museums, to be published byMelbourne University Press in 2006.

Jill Julius Matthews is a Reader in History at the Australian National University.She has written extensively in Australian social and cultural history, and in thefields of feminist history, history of popular culture, and history of sexuality.Her publications include Good and Mad Women. The Historical Construction ofFemininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984),Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures (editor, St Leonards, NSW: Allen &Unwin, 1997), and Dance Hall and Picture Palace. Sydney’s Romance withModernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005).

Michael A. McDonnell has recently been appointed to a new post in AtlanticHistory at the University of Sydney after teaching for several years at theUniversity of Wales, Swansea. He has a book forthcoming entitled The Politicsof War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (University of NorthCarolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History andCulture), and has published several articles on the American Revolution in theWilliam and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of American History, the Journal ofAmerican Studies, and the Australasian Journal of American Studies. He iscurrently working on a new project entitled ‘Beyond Borders: Indians, French,and Métis in the Great Lakes 1700-1850’.

John Maynard is an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellow withUmullilko Centre for Indigenous Higher Education Research at the University

Contributors  ix

of Newcastle. His traditional roots lie with the Worimi people of Port Stephens,New South Wales. He was the recipient of the Aboriginal History (ANU) StannerFellowship for 1996 and the New South Wales Premiers Indigenous HistoryFellowship for 2003–2004. He has worked with and within many Aboriginalcommunities, urban, rural and remote. He is the author of Aboriginal Stars ofthe Turf: Jockeys of Australian Racing History (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal StudiesPress, 2003) and a number of articles on the history of Aboriginal protestmovements in New South Wales.

Hsu-Ming Teo teaches in the Department of Modern History, MacquarieUniversity. She is currently researching the culture of romantic love in Australiaand finishing another project on British colonialism, race and the mass-marketromance novel. She co-edited Cultural History in Australia (Sydney: Universityof New South Wales Press, 2003) and has published articles on travel history,romance and imperialism. In 1999 she won The Australian Vogel Literary Awardfor her first novel, Love and Vertigo. Her second novel, Behind the Moon, waspublished in 2005.

Patrick Wolfe is an ARC Research Fellow at the Europe-Australia Institute,Victoria University of Technology. He is the author of Settler Colonialism andthe Transformation of Anthropology : The Politics and Poetics of an EthnographicEvent (London and New York, NY: Cassell, 1999) and a number of articles onrace, colonialism and the history of anthropology. His current research projectis a comparative international study of racial discourse.

Angela Woollacott is Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University.Her books include Gender and Empire (Palgrave, 2006); To Try Her Fortune inLondon: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford and New York,NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); and On Her Their Lives Depend: MunitionsWorkers in the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).She has also co-edited two anthologies: Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and AngelaWoollacott (eds) Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford and Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishers, 1999) and Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds)Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

x  Connected Worlds

For John Docker and Sam Lake

1. Introduction

Ann Curthoys

Marilyn Lake

For some years, historians have been pointing to the significance and implicationsof history’s complicity with the nation state. History as a professional disciplinewas constituted to serve the business of nation building, and has accordinglyvery often seen its task as providing an account of national experience, valuesand traditions, thus helping forge a national community. The question historiansare now asking is: has history as handmaiden to the nation state distorted orlimited our understanding of the past? And if so, can a transnational approachhelp develop new and more adequate forms of historical writing?1

This collection of essays addresses these questions and also seeks to demonstratein practice what transnational history looks like. It investigates with anenthusiastic, if critical eye the potential of transnational approaches to developnew understandings of the past by highlighting historical processes andrelationships that transcend nation states and that connect apparently separateworlds. Our aim is both theoretical, for instance considering the claims of‘postcolonial’, ‘regional’, or ‘world history’ approaches to illuminate historicalanalysis, and practical, presenting historical case studies that demonstrate howtransnational approaches can produce new and exciting forms of historicalknowledge. We particularly focus on ways in which expertise in ‘Australianhistory’ can contribute to and benefit from transnational histories, though anumber of important essays in this collection do not touch on Australia at all.

Defining transnational historySo, what is transnational history? We can define it in a number of ways, but putsimply, it is the study of the ways in which past lives and events have beenshaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders ofnation states. Transnational history seeks to understand ideas, things, people,and practices which have crossed national boundaries. It is generally in a complexrelation with national history; it may seek to interrogate, situate, supersede,displace, or avoid it altogether. In their reaction against what they see as rigidand confining national histories, many of those enthusiastic about transnational

1 See Ann Curthoys 2003, ‘Cultural History and the Nation’, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White

(eds), Cultural History in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press), pp. 22-37;

Marilyn Lake 2003, ‘White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project’,

Australian Historical Studies, vol. 34, no. 122, pp. 346-63; Marilyn Lake c2003, ‘History and Nation’,

in Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash (Melbourne: Black Inc.), pp. 160-73.

history reach for metaphors of fluidity, as in talk of circulation and flows (ofpeople, discourses , and commodities), alongside metaphors of connection andrelationship.

How does transnational history differ, if at all, from other kinds of history whichalso transcend national boundaries: world, regional, and comparative history?World history seeks to understand the world as a whole; at its best, as TonyBallantyne puts it in his chapter in this collection, it ‘pays close attention to“bundles of relationships” … and is sensitive to the complex interplays betweendifferent layers of the analysis: the local, the regional, the inter-regional, thenational, the continental, and the global’.2 Regional histories, sometimesorganised around oceanic formations – the Pacific Rim or the Atlantic World,whose historiography is discussed in this collection by Michael McDonnell –also insist on the necessity of locating nations in larger economic and politicalnetworks. Comparative history is a form of history which crosses national bordersby taking two or more societies (cities, regions, nations) and comparing aspectsof their history. Such approaches are valuable but they very often keep the ideaof the nation both central and intact. Comparative histories are also notoriouslydifficult to execute well, so large is the sheer quantity of scholarship that isnormally required, and so hard is it to translate the conceptual frameworkdeveloped by and for one national or regional history into that of another.

Transnational histories, then, can take many forms. They may be studies ofinternational organisations, taking as their subjects already constituted bodiessuch as the Pan-African Congress or the League of Nations, and charting theirhistorical development. Or they may be individual biographies, as exemplifiedin a forthcoming collection called Colonial Lives across the British Empire.3

Transnational biographies are represented in this volume in Emma Christopher’saccount of transported convict, Thomas Limpus; Desley Deacon’s discussion offilm-maker, Walter Wanger; and Jill Matthews’s evocation of the varied careerof film entrepreneur, J. D. Williams. Other forms of transnational history includeimperial histories, and histories of land and maritime exploration, ideas, politicalmovements, migration, voyaging, and environments.4

Transnational history has, then, many departure points and follows many linesof enquiry. Whatever form it takes, transnational history suggests that historicalunderstanding often requires us to move beyond a national framework of

2 Ballantyne, this volume, p. 23.3 David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds) 2006, Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial

Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).4 See, for example, Bernard Klein and Gesa Mackentheun (eds) 2004, Sea Changes: Historicizing

the Ocean (New York, NY: Routledge).

6  Connected Worlds

analysis, to explore connections between peoples, societies and events usuallythought of as distinct and separate.

Transnational historiographyThe interest in transnational history has grown rapidly during the 1990s and2000s, and there is now a significant literature discussing what it is, why weneed it, and how to do it. One major source of this enthusiasm has been fromhistorians of the United States. Ian Tyrrell, one such scholar working in Australia,is an early and persistent advocate of transnational approaches. His target in‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’ (1991) was a formof American history writing which focused on the idea of the United States as‘“outside” the normal patterns and laws of history’, and especially as differentfrom Europe.5 Despite an interest in relating the United States to the rest of theworld and a strong tradition in comparative history, he argues, historians of theUnited States failed to ‘transcend the boundaries of nationalist historiography’.As an alternative, he suggested that ‘the possibilities of a transnational historymust be considered’.6 Instead of assuming American exceptionalism, historianscould ask why it has been such a focus for historians of the United States, andby way of contrast depict United States history ‘as a variation on transnationalthemes’. He pointed out that there was another American historical traditionthat offered an alternative to nationalist exceptionalism, one which saw theUnited States as a prime site for cosmopolitan exchange. Key advocates ofAmerican cosmopolitanism had included feminist Jane Addams in her NewerIdeals of Peace (1907) and Randolph Bourne in his neglected essay, ‘Trans-NationalAmerica’ (1916), whose importance is noted by Desley Deacon in this volume,where she explores the the hopes that the new American film industry in the1920s and 1930s would become a major source of ‘world acquaintanceship’.Tyrrell also noted other forms of transnational history: regional approaches onthe model of the French Annales school, and global and world history informedby world systems theory and other approaches to conceptualising world historyas a whole. Histories of the environment and of international movements andorganisations were also subjects that clearly required the transcending of nationalboundaries.7

5 Ian Tyrrell 1991, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, American Historical

Review, vol. 96, pp. 1031-55; these quotes on pp. 1031 and 1032.6 ibid., p. 1033.7 ibid., pp. 1038-54. The movements he had in mind might be organised around class, race, gender,

or religion, and examples he gave included the Woman Christian Temperance Union, the Industrial

Workers of the World, the United Society for Christian Endeavor, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal

Negro Improvement Association.

Introduction  7

The term ‘transnational’ caught on, and enthusiasm for it grew quickly in theUnited States. In a special issue of the Journal of American History ontransnational history the following year, David Thelen suggested that atransnational approach could ‘enrich historical understanding by providingother pasts and presents to compare with the American past and present’.8 Eightyears after the appearance of his original article, Tyrrell developed his earlierargument further. He now demonstrated in greater detail that the national historyhe was criticising had become dominant in the United States only during andafter World War I; before then, a transnational approach had coexisted withnation-centred professional history, and indeed had flourished. In particular,he noted, a broad transnational approach had been taken by women’s historianssuch as Jane Addams and African American historians such as W. E. B. Du Boisand C. L. R. James.9

The latter point was expanded upon in the same issue of the Journal of AmericanHistory by Robin Kelley, who argued that Black history in the United States hadalways been transnational. Early black historians had had a diasporic sensibility,shaped by their antiracist and anti-imperialist politics; they had consistentlyopposed the racist assumptions of their white counterparts, who constituted themainstream historical profession in America, but in turn found their workgenerally dismissed by that profession as ideological rather than truly historical.In the Cold War context, black intellectuals had intensified their internationalism.In contrast to other kinds of history, Kelley argued, the transnationalism ofAfrican American intellectuals was born not in the academy but in ‘socialmovements for freedom, justice, and self-determination’.10

During the 1990s, an interest in transnational history also came from quiteanother quarter – the revived interest in British imperial history. Althoughcritical of the cultural emphasis of the new imperial history, A. G. Hopkins wasimportant in calling for a reintegration of national postcolonial histories into abroader imperial framework. In the world of historiography, the response todecolonisation in the 1960s and after had been the separate development in eachpostcolonial nation of a professional, academic, national history. It was time,Hopkins argued in 1999, to bring these postcolonial histories back into

8 David Thelen 1992, ‘Of Audiences, Borderlands and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalisation

of American History’, The Journal of American History, vol. 79, issue 2, pp. 432-62.9 Ian Tyrrell 1999, ‘Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire’,

The Journal of American History (special issue entitled ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational

Perspectives on United States History’), vol. 86, issue 3, pp. 1015-44.10 Robin D. G. Kelley 1999, ‘“But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History’s Global Vision’,

Journal of American History, vol. 86, pp. 1054-77.

8  Connected Worlds

conversation with one another and with Britain, this time, ‘without deference’.11

Furthermore, as historians like Catherine Hall and Antoinette Burton pointedout, renewed attention to histories of imperialism considered not only the impactof ‘Europe’ on its colonial possessions, but also the impact of imperialism onmetropolitan societies. Imperial powers not only had dramatic impact on thelives of the peoples they colonised, but were also themselves in important waysconstituted by the colonising experience. As Burton put it, scholars like EdwardSaid, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and others had provoked ‘a critical return to theconnections between metropole and colony, race and nation’.12

Both the American and the British enthusiasm for new kinds of transnationalhistory were consonant with a growing focus on comparative histories of whitesettler societies, those forms of colonial society which had displaced indigenouspeoples from their land. This was a form of colonialism distinguished from othersby its relative lack of interest in ‘native’ labour, and hence very often, in keepingthe ‘native’ alive at all. Most of the European colonial empires included settlercolonies; in the English-speaking world, the modern societies sharing this historyinclude the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in a limited sense,South Africa. There was a revived interest in comparing the histories of thesesocieties in the 1990s; Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis’s edited collection,Unsettling Settler Societies (1995), was important in re-popularising the term.13

Historians began once again to develop expertise in the history of more thanone settler society: Alan Lester and Elizabeth Elbourne, for example, havedemonstrated how settler societies were interconnected in the nineteenth centuryas a result of British imperial policy, especially on matters of Aboriginal policyand settler practice.14 Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips, and ShurleeSwain have provided a detailed comparison of the political rights and statusesof Indigenous peoples in settler societies of the British Empire: Australia, Canada,

11 A. G. Hopkins (ed.) 2003, Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico).12 Antoinette Burton 2003, ‘Introduction’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking

with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 2.13 Deborah Montgomerie 1997, ‘Beyond the Search for Good Imperialism: The Challenge of

Comparative Ethnohistory’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 153-68.14 Alan Lester 2002, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal,

no. 54, p. 26; Alan Lester 2002, ‘Colonial Settlers and the Metropole: Racial Discourse in the Early

Nineteenth Century Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand’, Landscape Research, vol. 27, no. 1,

pp. 39-49; Elizabeth Elbourne 2003, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835-36 Select Committee on

Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth Century British White

Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 4, no. 3, accessed 10 November

2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v004/4.3elbourne.html

Introduction  9

New Zealand, and South Africa.15 There has been a substantial contribution tothis scholarship by Australian feminist historians such as Anne Keary, KatEllinghaus, and Ann McGrath, all of whom have compared aspects of Indigenouspeople’s histories in Australia and the United States.16

American historians of the United States have been much less likely to includetheir country in this category than Australian or Canadian or New Zealandhistorians do, partly because the history of African slavery complicates and tosome degree obscures the history of Native American displacement and erasureand partly because their achievement of political independence throughrevolution is seen to mark a sharp break from their history as a settler colony.Ian Tyrrell is among those who have argued strongly that the United Statesshould be included in this analytical framework. Reorienting American historyto transnational themes would be incomplete, he observed in 2002, if the focusremained on connections with Europe. Comparisons between the United Statesand the other British settler societies, he pointed out, were taken for granted bynineteenth century commentators such as Froude, Trollope, Dilke, Jebb, Seeley,and Bryce, but had fallen out of favour with the rise of nationalism during andafter World War I. It was time, he suggested, for historical analysis to return tothese connections.17

Gaining new insights: the transnational history of blackpolitical movementsThe gains, then, seem very clear. As historians we all belong and have obligationsto an international interpretative historical community as well as to our ownsocieties. Taking a transnational approach enables us to take fuller advantageof the insights of this world of international professional scholarship. We cantrace connections between people, ideas, and political movements that are lost

15 Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips, and Shurlee Swain 2003, Equal Subjects Unequal

Rights: Indigenous People in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University

Press).16 Patrick Wolfe 2001, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, American

Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 866-905; Anne Keary 2002, Translating Colonialism:

Missionaries and Indigenous Peoples in Eastern Australia and Northwestern America, paper delivered

to American Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 3-6 January; Katherine Ellinghaus

2002, ‘Margins of Acceptability: Class, Education and Interracial Marriage in Australia and North

America’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 55-75; Ann McGrath forthcoming,

Entangled Frontiers: Marriage and Sex Across Colonizing Frontiers in Australia and North America

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).17 Ian Tyrrell 2002, ‘Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the

Internationalization of American History’, in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in

a Global Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 168-92; these quotes on p. 169.

10  Connected Worlds

to vision when a firmly national framework is held in place. These possibilitiesseem to be especially important in the study of movements protesting againstracial inequality and exploitation. John Maynard’s chapter, for example,demonstrates hitherto little-known links between Marcus Garvey’s United NegroImprovement Association and Aboriginal political struggles in New South Walesin the early decades of the twentieth century. In our own recent research, wehave both independently found that connections between Black civil rightsmovements in the United States and campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australiaare important to understanding the latter’s political dynamics. A transnationalperspective offers insight into the interconnectedness of political movementsand ideas.

In Marilyn’s research for her biographical study of Faith Bandler, one of theleading campaigners for the 1967 Referendum on Aboriginal citizenship, itbecame clear that Faith’s Pacific Islander family’s strong identification with theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People and with culturalheroes, such as the singer Paul Robeson encouraged her to take a stand againstracial discrimination and segregation in Australia. Inspiration came from manyquarters. In 1951 as a delegate to the Youth Cultural Congress in Berlin and amember of the Margaret Walker Dance Company, Faith performed the lead partin ‘The Dance of the Little Aboriginal Girl’, a ballet which (despite its name) wasbased on a Black American poem, ‘The Merry-Go Round’, written by HarlemRenaissance poet, Langston Hughes, to combat racial prejudice in the playgroundsof the South. When Faith first spoke at a public meeting in Sydney in the early1950s, it was in protest at the gaoling in the United States of the left-wing writerand suspected Communist Howard Fast, whose novel Freedom Road, a tributeto the Black freedom ushered in by Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War,was based on W. E. B. Du Bois’ historical study, Black Reconstruction. Faithendorsed their ideal of Blacks and Whites living and working together andespoused it in subsequent life-long campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia,and in her work for the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines andTorres Strait Islanders, that culminated in the passage of the 1967 referendum.18

Ann’s book on the Australian Freedom Ride of 1965, published in the same year,2002, was initially conceived as a national, or even local, history project. Heraim was to explore a very specific political movement – its antecedents, multiplecharacter, tensions, and effects. The Freedom Ride was a two week event inwhich university students, mainly non-Indigenous but with an Indigenousleader, Charles Perkins, travelled around country towns in New South Walesprotesting against discrimination against Indigenous people. In the ensuingpublic debate, urban public knowledge of racial discrimination grew, some

18 Marilyn Lake 2002, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (Sydney: Allen and Unwin).

Introduction  11

soul-searching went on in the country towns, racial segregation was challengedand in some cases ended, and alternative ideas of inclusion, equality, and fullcitizenship rights were much debated. Along with many other events andcampaigns, the Freedom Ride contributed to the holding and passing of thereferendum of 1967.

Freedom Ride was conceived around the time of the Bicentennial of the Britishcolonisation of Australia, in 1988, that key moment when debate over Aboriginalhistory emerged as significant in national public discourse. It was researched inthe 1990s as national public discourse dealt successively with a series of majorissues concerning Indigenous people and Indigenous rights: the Royal Commissioninto Aboriginal Deaths in Police Custody of 1991, the Mabo decision of 1992,Native Title legislation in 1993, the Wik decision of 1996, and the StolenGenerations report of 1997. It was written in 2001, in the contexts of the HistoryWars over frontier violence and the rapid growth of an anti-Aboriginal rightsagenda within national politics and discourse.

But in the research and writing, the question of the international context of theAustralian Freedom Ride was always an issue. In particular, Ann was aware,having been a participant, of the importance of the influence of the United StatesCivil Rights movement, and to a lesser extent of the context of worldwideadjustment to decolonisation in Africa and Asia. As she researched the book shedelved further into the question of the influence of American developments,tracing the Australian students’ awareness of the United States Freedom Ridesof 1961, of Martin Luther King’s ideas of non-violence, and so on. Researchexplored the Australian press coverage of the United States Civil Rightsmovement, and interviews with former Freedom Riders elicited furtherinformation. When asked what influenced their thinking on racial issues, asignificant number mentioned African American influences – Paul Robeson’svisit to Australia in 1960 when they were teenagers, the press images of dogsand hoses being directed at children in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin LutherKing’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, August 1963, and so forth.

But there was always a worry about stressing United States influence, about anysuggestions that these movements were ‘mere imitations’, slavish copies ofmovements that originated elsewhere. There was also the fear of a radicalnationalist response: in stressing United States influences you are demeaningwhat we did, you are reducing us to mere imitators of United States forms ofactivism. And indeed, if national political movements are understood purely interms of overseas influences and connections, then it is true, one does lose thesense of the distinctiveness of the political movement in its particular Australiancontext. One reaches the point where one is asked, as Ann was recently by avisiting American historian, ‘where did the idea for the Tent Embassy comefrom? I can’t think of anything like that in the US’. Allied with this desire not

12  Connected Worlds

to drown Australian history in an ocean of overseas influence was the aim towrite Australian history as a story important in itself, and not merely as anepiphenomenon of events elsewhere. This desire has been important in Australianhistoriography since the 1970s, as historians reacted against earlier views ofAustralian history as purely a product of British history, the transplantation ofBritish people in a distant and alien land.

In thinking about ways in which to conceptualise outside influences on nationalhistories, we found an article by Sean Scalmer to be especially helpful. Entitled‘Translating Contention: Culture, History, and the Circulation of CollectiveAction’,19 it treats the Freedom Ride as an example of the active connection,translation, and circulation between local movements and societies. He replacesthe idea of imitation with the concepts of networks and circulation. Borrowingis never mere imitation, he suggests, as local movements select only those actionsfrom elsewhere that fit their own normative standards and which have beenmade meaningful in local discursive and political frameworks. This is a usefulway of emphasising the power of the local as well as the importance of the global.And it is also helpful in making sense of the circulation of technologies such asthe literacy test, used by self-styled white men’s countries at the end of thenineteenth century as an instrument of racial exclusion, the subject of Marilyn’schapter in this volume. As it moved between the United States, South Africaand Australia, the literacy test changed its form from the requirement to writeone’s name, to fill out a form in English, to understanding the constitution, towriting out, at dictation, a passage of fifty words in a European language. Thetest changed as the people targeted for exclusion changed, from Blacks, to Italians,to Indians to Japanese.

The dangers of transnational historyIt is clear, then, that historical understanding requires us to move beyond thenational frames of analysis that so often blinker our view of the past. But inrepudiating national stories history also risks losing relevance for a nationalaudience. In response to Tyrrell’s original article advocating transnational history,Michael McGerr worried that too strong a turn to the transnational might leadto ‘estrangement from our audiences, which, at least in the United States, stillseem intensely nationalistic’.20 In this volume, Jill Matthews draws attentionto this issue. Speaking of Australia specifically, but it could apply in many othersocieties as well, she writes:

19 Sean Scalmer 2000, ‘Translating Contention: Culture, History, and the Circulation of Collective

Action’, Alternatives, vol. 25, pp. 491-514.20 Michael McGerr 1991, ‘The Price of the “New Transnational History”’, The American Historical

Review, vol. 96, no. 4, pp. 1056-67; this quote on p. 1066.

Introduction  13

There is something sacrosanct about certain aspects of culture … thattriggers the protective, exclusive, mutual embrace; that constitutes asettled ‘us’ against the nomadic hordes of ‘them’. And film history as agenre has been seduced, or recruited, to tell that story.

In their cultural nationalism, film historians are expressing a much widerphenomenon, and Matthews concludes that a transnational approach will notbe welcome ‘until the larger political discourse changes’.

There is little sign that political discourse will, at least in the short to mediumterm, abandon cultural and other forms of nationalism in which history andhistorians play a significant part. In their recent collection, Partisan Histories,Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney point to the role history plays in nationalcontexts. In national politics, groups seek support ‘by presenting themselves asthe only true representatives of the nation through historical narratives thatsupport that claim: the rationale for nationalism is always sought in history’.21

Indeed, history ‘can influence such momentous decisions as whether or not togo to war’.22 This is as true in Australia as anywhere else; the importance ofdefining and mining national historical traditions for political purposes is clearlyevident in Prime Minister John Howard’s relentless espousal of the virtues ofAustralia’s military tradition.23

Given the intensely local and national relevance of history, then, it seems to usthat there are dangers in transnational histories becoming disconnected fromlocal audiences and by extension national political debates. The issue may notseem so pertinent for historians writing about societies other than the one inwhich they live and work, but for those who write histories about their ownsociety, and who are thus used to dealing with questions of history’s politicalrelevance and sensitivity, the problem of losing relevance and readers can bequite acute. The temptation to write purely for an international scholarlyaudience can lead to histories which concentrate on showing local material onlywhen it illuminates international scholarly concerns. It often also meanspublishing only in specialised journals or in expensive books which are littleknown and often of little interest to local audiences. As a result, there is thedanger that the people whose history we write will know little of our work;

21 Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney (eds) 2005, ‘Introduction’, in Partisan Histories: The Past

in Contemporary Global Politics (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 4.22 ibid., p. 1.23 Marilyn Lake 2005, ‘The Howard History of Australia’, The Age, 20 August.

14  Connected Worlds

even if they do know it, they recognise that we are not really talking to them.Our gaze has moved elsewhere.24

The implications of the tension between national histories and transnationalscholarship are especially evident in the example of the history of Indigenouspeoples. Such histories provide an excellent illustration of both the promise andthe problems that attend transnational approaches. The promise is an enhancedunderstanding of the interactions between Indigenous and settler peoples andspecifically of Indigenous people’s political struggles, as John Maynard’s chapterhere so ably demonstrates. The danger is disconnection from local audiencesand politics, the very connections that have made Indigenous histories soimportant and vibrant in the first place. Historians of Indigenous peoples,whether we are Indigenous or not, can thus find ourselves pulled betweenengaging in a national debate, in which our professionalism and scholarship isdirectly connected to ongoing political issues concerning Indigenous rights andpolitics, and contributing to a worldwide historians’ conversation concerningnew ways of conceptualising historical processes such as colonialism.

Australian perspectivesThe enthusiasm for transnational history often expresses something of thecharacter of the national histories against which it is rebelling. If the UnitedStates interest was prompted by an objection to United States exceptionalismand the British interest by a return to the vexed question of the imperial past,the Australian version has been influenced by a desire to break out ofhistoriographical marginality and isolation.

It is perhaps significant that this collection is edited by two historians who haveboth worked in the fields of Australian feminist history and race relations history,each of which has been a prime site for the development of more transnationalapproaches. Feminist history has long been more internationalist in its approachthan many other fields of history, as the common project of studying women’shistory and developing gendered perspectives on the past generally has ledfeminist historians into international conversations even while structuring theirown histories within fairly conventional national boundaries. The tri-annualBerkshire Conferences on Women’s History and the International Federation ofResearch into Women’s History have both been important sites for thisinternational exchange. The practice of contributing national studies tomulti-authored international collections of essays on a common theme, a kindof half-way house on the way to transnationalising history, is particularly evident

24 Ann Curthoys 2003, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop

Already?’, in Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn, pp. 70-89; Ann Curthoys 2002, ‘Does Australian

History have a Future?’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 118, pp. 140-52.

Introduction  15

in feminist historical scholarship.25 Race relations history has also been in theforefront of new developments in transnational history.

Despite their inherent cross-cultural and crossing-borders character, studies ofrace relations have too often, however, been narrowly and nationally focused,as Mary Dudziak has observed for the United States.26 There is a growing bodyof work which attempts to compare not only the race-based political movementsdiscussed earlier, but also the transnational character of racial thinking and racialpolicies. Patrick Wolfe, for example, has explored racial thinking in Australia,the United States, and elsewhere, while Marilyn Lake is engaged in exploringthe transnational dynamics of the formation of self-styled ‘white men’scountries’.27

It isn’t only feminist and race relations historians who have sought to go beyondnational boundaries. In the case of Australian historiography, Donald Denoon,with various collaborators, has long sought to place Australian history withinPacific regional history.28 Historians of convict transportation, exemplified inthis volume by Emma Christopher, have begun to insist that their subjects cannotbe understood within the narrow confines of an Australian historiography.29

25 See for just some examples, Ulla Wiklander, Alice Kessler-Harris and Jane Lewis (eds) 1995,

Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920 (Urbana,

IL: University of Illinois Press); Marilyn Lake 1996, ‘Female Desire: The Meaning of World War

2’, reprinted in Joan Scott (ed.), Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Marilyn

Lake 1998, ‘The Inviolable Woman: Feminist Theories of Citizenship, Australia 1900–1945’, in Joan

Landes (ed.), Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford University Press, Oxford) and ‘Australian

Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man’, in Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism

(Manchester: Manchester University Press). See also Fiona Paisley 1999, ‘“Unnecessary Crimes and

Tragedies”: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Australian Policies of Aboriginal Child Removal’, in

Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernity (New York, NY: Routledge), pp.

134-47; Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (eds) 2001, Women’s Rights and Human

Rights: International Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave); special issue of Australian

Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 36.26 Mary L. Dudziak 2000, Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).27 Marilyn Lake 2004, ‘The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century’,

History Workshop Journal, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 41-62.28 Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein-Smith, with Marivic Wyndham 2000, A History of Australia,

New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford, U.K.; Maiden, Mass.; Blackwell); Donald Denoon, with Marivic

Wyndham 2000, ‘Australia and the Western Pacific’, in Roger Louis and Alaine Low (eds), The

Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).29 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Cassandra Pybus 2002, American Citizens, British Slaves (Melbourne:

Melbourne University Press); Cassandra Pybus 2002, ‘The World is All of One Piece: The African

16  Connected Worlds

David Goodman has compared the gold rush experience in Victoria and Californiaand Kirsten McKenzie the history of scandal in Sydney and Cape Town.30 IanTyrrell has compared environmental reform movements in Australia andCalifornia while Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin have brought togetherenvironmental historians of a number of settler societies.31 This volume seeksto add significantly to this growing body of work, even as we recognise thecontinuing importance of engaging a local audience and joining local debatesabout Australian historical experience, values and traditions.

This volumeWe hope to advance the historiographical debates of the last decade, and to thatend the volume begins with three historiographical essays. The first, by TonyBallantyne, places an examination of C. A. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004) within the context of abrief and illuminating history of world history. He praises Bayly’s breadth, hisattention to the Islamic world and South Asia, his clarity on the connectionsbetween race, empire, and violence, but draws attention to his relatively thintreatment of subjectivity and colonial modernity. Michael McDonnell outlinesthe explosion of interest in the history of the Atlantic world, drawing attentionto its continuing Anglo-American centrism and suggesting that, despiterecognition of the Black Atlantic, Atlantic history ‘is in danger of becoming aneo-imperial form of history; one dominated by the rise of the British Empire,and the birth of the United States’. In its place he advocates a more genuinelypan-Atlantic approach, comparing and combining studies of North and SouthAmerica. He warns, though, of the danger that such approaches might becomeso encompassing and all-embracing that they end up with no audience, no clearnarrative, and much confusion. Angela Woollacott concludes this section bydefining the characteristics of postcolonial histories, and analysing CatherineHall’s Civilizing Subjects as a justly celebrated example of postcolonial historyat its best. Her work, says Woollacott, ‘stands out for its political commitmentto drawing attention to the continuing negative consequences of imperialismand colonialism’. She argues, though, that the book does not take full advantage

Diaspora and Transportation to Australia’, in Ruth Hamilton (ed.), Routes of Passage: Rethinking the

African Diaspora (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press).30 Kirsten McKenzie 2004, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne:

Melbourne University Press); David Goodman 1994, Gold-Seeking: Victoria and California in the

1850s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin).31 Ian Tyrrell 1999, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform,

1860–1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press); Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds)

1997, Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Keele: Keele University

Press).

Introduction  17

of postcolonial scholarship, such as that offered by the Subaltern Studieshistorians; nor does it sufficiently place its study within a broad imperialframework.

The second section explores voyages and migrations to and from Australia in awide variety of places (Britain, China, the United States, and India) and periods(from the late eighteenth century to the present). Emma Christopher focuses onthe larger context of convict transportation to New South Wales, tracing throughthe experiences of one man, Thomas Limpus, three different but connectedvoyages – to West Africa, to the slave city of Baltimore (though he mutinied andescaped before the ship arrived), and finally to Botany Bay. John Fitzgerald takesus on a wonderful journey between colonial New South Wales and China, as heexplores the early history of the New South Wales branch of the internationalHung League, or Chinese Masonic Society, attempting to sort intriguing historyfrom fascinating legend. Margaret Allen contrasts the Australian missionarywomen who travelled freely to India in the first half of the twentieth centurywith the experiences of the growing number of middle class Indian travellerswho sought to visit Australia. White Australian expectations of mobility arecontrasted with the White Australia Policy’s construction of Indians as havingno rights to mobility. ‘The mobility of modernity’, she concludes, ‘was reservedfor those deemed white’. Finally, Jim Hammerton explores the migration of the‘Ten Pound Poms’, the million British people who came to Australia in the twodecades or so after World War II. He points out that many of them regardedtheir migration, initially at least, as a move ‘simply “from one part of Britain toanother”’, and draws attention to the ease of movement the Empire and itsaftermath brought to British citizens. Yet along with privilege went many painfulpersonal experiences of migration, and he considers the changing ways in whichfamily relationships were maintained, if weakened, over very long distances.

The mobility of white modernity evoked by Allen and Hammerton is also thetheme for the third section, entitled ‘Modernity, Film, and Romance’. DesleyDeacon explores Walter Wanger’s idea of film as fostering cosmopolitanism andtransnationalism, film as a kind of ‘foreign office’ enabling one culture tounderstand another. In this spirit Paramount developed nature documentary onthe one hand and bright sophisticated New York movies on the other. JillMatthews traces the career of J. D. Williams, a film entrepreneur who workedin the emerging film industry in three continents. Starting in the United States,he was successful in developing the film industry in Australia, Britain, Canada,and again in the United States. She points out that although parts of this careerare known to the national film historians of each country, the career as a whole– and its interconnections – has not been understood previously by any of them.Also focusing on modernity, Hsu-Ming Teo explores the ways in which particularideas about and practices of romantic love have become increasingly transnationalbecause of the global reach of Anglophone culture and the impact of American

18  Connected Worlds

advertising and marketing industries. In examining the transformation ofAustralian understandings of romance, she also points to the gendered time-lagin the embrace of commodified dating culture.

The questions of race introduced in parts one and two reappear in a differentform in part four. John Maynard explores the hitherto little-known influenceon the Australian Aboriginal activists of the 1920s of Marcus Garvey’s UniversalNegro Improvement Association, formed first in Jamaica and then spreadingthrough the United States and carried across the world often by working seamen.He also points out that Aboriginal Australians, though closely attached to theirown country and for many decades denied freedom of movement, have alsotravelled abroad, and in the process developed new insights into their situationat home. International travel made some of them aware that ‘others around theglobe had shared similar tragedy under the weight of colonisation’. MarilynLake points out that in their focus on nations as imagined communities, historianshave too often forgotten the importance of transnational racial identifications.She draws attention to W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1910 recognition of the ‘new religion’of whiteness that was sweeping the world in the early twentieth century. Shealso argues that a key instrument of whiteness was the literacy or dictation test,and whereas previous studies of the White Australia Policy have recognised theinfluence of Natal in this regard, they have not noticed the American precedentsin Mississippi in 1890 and the American Immigration Act of 1896. Such tests,she argues, worked to consolidate understandings of ‘race’ in terms of adichotomy of whites and non-whites around the world.

The volume ends with an extended essay on Islamic India and its repression innationalist Indian historiography. Given its origin and existence as an alternativeto or critique of national history, transnational history as an idea and a practicehas tended to be of particular interest to historians of the modern era, where thenation has been such an important organising principle, both intellectually andpedagogically. Yet, as Tony Ballantyne points out in his essay, it has also beenimportant for historians of earlier periods in its stimulus to the study of largeregions, most notably ‘Eurasia’, (including India, China, Central Asia and Europe),the Atlantic world (Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean) and thesocieties around the Indian Ocean (East Africa, South and Southeast Asia). Thepre-modern aspect of transnational history is represented here in Patrick Wolfe’scontribution, which emphasises the long historical connections between Europe,the Mediterranean Islamic world including Muslim Spain, and Islamic India.Transnational approaches, broadly conceived, he reflects, can help us be waryof false homogenised images of Europe, or Islam, or India. ‘Europe’, he argues,cannot be seen as entirely distinct from Hindu or Islamic culture – they wereintricately connected and mutually influencing. As a result, when Europe in thenineteenth century confronted Muslim India, it was also ‘returning to its own

Introduction  19

repressed’, a tradition of repression that has been perpetuated in both Britishand Indian nationalist historiography.

One final comment. This book is being published by ANU E Press, a new pressfocusing on online publication with print-on-demand book copies also available.Since the technology of access means many readers can read chapters singly,rather than in book form, we have endeavoured to ensure that each chapter canstand alone. What may be lost in the conversations between chapters will bemade up, we hope, in the easy and open and inexpensive access to this workaround the world. And that is transnational in spirit indeed.

20  Connected Worlds